dination,
that its bases are laid in the nature of man. Is anything, then, of
God's contriving endangered by inquiry? Was it the system of the
universe, or the monks, that trembled at the telescope of Galileo? Did
the circulation of the firmament stop in terror because Newton laid his
daring finger on its pulse? But it is idle to discuss a proposition so
monstrous. There is no right of sanctuary for a crime against humanity,
and they who drag an unclean thing to the horns of the altar bring it
to vengeance, and not to safety.

Even granting that Slavery were all that its apologists assume it to
be, and that the relation of master and slave were of God's appointing,
would not its abuses be just the thing which it was the duty of
Christian men to protest against, and, as far as might be, to root out?
Would our courts feel themselves debarred from interfering to rescue a
daughter from a parent who wished to make merchandise of her purity, or
a wife from a husband who was brutal to her, by the plea that parental
authority and marriage were of Divine ordinance? Would a police-justice
discharge a drunkard who pleaded the patriarchal precedent of Noah? or
would he not rather give him another month in the House of Correction
for his impudence?

The Anti-slavery question is not one which the Tract Society can
exclude by triumphant majorities, nor put to shame by a comparison of
respectabilities. Mixed though it has been with politics, it is in no
sense political, and springing naturally from the principles of that
religion which traces its human pedigree to a manger, and whose first
apostles were twelve poor men against the whole world, it can dispense
with numbers and earthly respect. The clergyman may ignore it in the
pulpit, but it confronts him in his study; the church-member, who has
suppressed it in parish-meeting, opens it with the pages of his
Testament; the merchant, who has shut it out of his house and his
heart, finds it lying in wait for him, a gaunt fugitive, in the hold of
his ship; the lawyer, who has declared that it is no concern of his,
finds it thrust upon him in the brief of the slave-hunter; the
historian, who had cautiously evaded it, stumbles over it at Bunker
Hill. And why? Because it is not political, but moral,--because it is
not local, but national,--because it is not a test of party, but of
individual honesty and honor. The wrong which we allow our nation to
perpetrate we cannot localize, if we woul